The letter just quoted naturally served as a check to their intimacy, but Audubon did not withdraw his friendly hand, as shown by his letters to follow later, though his answer to this has not been preserved.[101] Audubon reached Edinburgh early in October, soon after receiving Swainson's decisive reply, and immediately made an arrangement with MacGillivray, as already related.[102] It is evident from Swainson's letter that when Audubon called upon him for editorial aid, he was by no means ready to defer to him wholly in the matter of naming his birds, a subject in which Swainson regarded himself as the first of living authorities. Swainson's pride was also wounded at Audubon's apparent lack of appreciation of the weight which his name would carry if allowed to grace the title pages of his works, and he speaks of Audubon as if he were ready to bargain for scientific information but determined to withhold that credit which is every writer's just due. It is only fair to say that Swainson's vanity seems to have outrun his candor, for when the controversy over the authorship of Audubon's _Biography of Birds_ was started in 1833, he publicly denied that any such proposal had been made.[103] According to Swainson's own statement, quoted earlier, Audubon was ready to grant him whatever credit was due, but it is evident that he was not then disposed to adopt Swainson's peculiar ideas upon the classification of birds or to enter upon a thoroughgoing arrangement of joint authorship. Though no philosopher himself, it seems clear that the American woodsman was by no means disposed to swallow all the vagaries of the "Circular System" to which his friend was committed, and which was later held up to ridicule. The craze for describing new species of animals was all too common in both England and America at the time of which we write; the chief aim of many naturalists seems to have been to attach their names to as many of nature's forms as possible. Swainson, who "never went to bed without describing a new species," as Audubon said at a later time, had admonished his friend above all else to hasten to publish descriptions of every new bird which he had obtained in America, lest he lose credit for the discovery; but Audubon, who had not hesitated to poke fun at the species-mongering Rafinesque, was still inclined to look with disdain upon work of this sort. He not only rejected Swainson's advice but answered it rather tartly in the first volume of his letterpress, which appeared in the following year. A passage which caused the naturalist no little annoyance on another score was as follows:[104]